MSNBC: The Hawaiian state health official who personally reviewed Barack Obama’s original birth certificate has affirmed again that the document is “real” and denounced “conspiracy theorists” in the so-called “birther” movement for continuing to spread bogus claims about the issue.

“It’s kind of ludicrous at this point,” Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the former director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, said in a rare telephone interview with NBC.

Fukino, sounding both exasperated and amused, spoke to a reporter in the aftermath of Donald Trump … questioning whether Obama has a legitimate birth certificate.

…No matter what state officials release on the issue, the “birthers” are going to question it, said Fukino. “They’re going to question the ink on which it was written or say it was fabricated. The whole thing is silly.”

As the top Hawaiian official in charge of state health records in 2008, when the issue of Obama’s birth first arose, Fukino said she thought she had put the matter to rest … she made two key points when asked about Trump’s recent comments.

The first is that the original so-called “long form” birth certificate – described by Hawaiian officials as a “record of live birth” – absolutely exists, located in a bound volume in a file cabinet on the first floor of the state Department of Health. Fukimo said she has personally inspected it – twice. The first time was in late October 2008, during the closing days of the presidential campaign, when the communications director for the state’s then Republican governor, Linda Lingle (who appointed Fukino) asked if she could make a public statement in response to claims then circulating on the Internet that Obama was actually born in Kenya.

Before she would do so, Fukino said, she wanted to inspect the files – and did so, taking with her the state official in charge of vital records. She found the original birth record, properly numbered, half typed and half handwritten, and signed by the doctor who delivered Obama, located in the files. She then put out a public statement asserting to the document’s validity…..

“It is real, and no amount of saying it is not, is going to change that,” Fukino said. Moreover, she added, her boss at the time, Lingle – who was backing John McCain for president – would presumably have to be in on any cover up since Fukino made her public comment at the governor’s office’s request. “Why would a Republican governor – who was stumping for the other guy – hold out on a big secret?” she asked.

….get over it

Her second point … is that the shorter, computer generated “certification of live birth” that was obtained by the Obama campaign in 2007, and has since been publicly released, is the standard document that anybody requesting their birth certificate from the state of Hawaii would receive from the health department.

The document was distributed to the Obama campaign in 2007 after Obama, at the request of a campaign official, personally signed a Hawaii birth certificate request form downloaded on the Internet….

The certification that the campaign received back – which shows that Obama was born in Honolulu at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961 – was based on the content of the original document in state files, Fukino said.

“What he got, everybody got. He put out exactly what everybody gets when they ask for a birth certificate.”

Hawaiian officials say that the certification is, in fact, only one piece of abundant evidence of Obama’s birth in Hawaii. Joshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Hawaii attorney general’s office, noted that a public index of vital records, available for inspection in a bound volume at the Health Department’s Office of Health Status Monitoring, lists a male child named “Obama II, Barack Hussein” as having been born in the state.

In addition, as Factcheck.org and other media organizations have repeatedly pointed out, both of Honolulu’s newspapers, the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961, and the Honolulu Star Bulletin, on Aug. 14, 1961, both ran birth announcements listing Obama’s birth on Aug. 4 of that year.

Even Fukino accepts that her comments are not likely to end the matter for the die-hard birthers. Trump and other skeptics have questioned why the original birth certificate has not been released.

But Wisch, the spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said state law does not in fact permit the release of “vital records,” including an original “record of live birth” – even to the individual whose birth it records.

“It’s a Department of Health record and it can’t be released to anybody,” he said. Nor do state laws have any provision that authorizes such records to be photocopied, Wisch said. If Obama wanted to personally visit the state health department, he would be permitted to inspect his birth record, Wisch said.

But if he or anybody else wanted a copy of their birth records, they would be told to fill out the appropriate state form and receive back the same computer generated “certification of live birth” form that everybody else gets – which is exactly what Obama did four years ago.

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EffieBlack: Trump is claiming that Ann Dunham Obama had a baby in Kenya, then got on a plane a few days after giving birth, flew halfway across the world, smuggled herself and her little brown baby into the United States, then conspired with her parents to plant a birth announcement, fake a birth certificate and then pretend for years that her son had been born in the United States.

He suggests that this happened because it was advantageous for little Barack to be an American citizen.

But, even under Trump’s ridiculous scenario, Barack would have been an American citizen, without all of the subterfuge. The fact that he was born to an American mother would have automatically made him a citizen of the United States, regardless where the birth actually occurred. And even if it didn’t, he could easily have become a citizen through naturalization. As a naturalized citizen, he would have all of the rights, privileges and immunities of a natural-born citizen – he could vote, he could buy property, he could run for public office, he could become a mayor or congressman or senator. The only thing he couldn’t do is become President.

But does anyone really believe that a white teenager whose marriage to an African man was not even legal in several states, back in 1961, just seven years after the Brown decision, six years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, two years before the March on Washington, three years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, four years before the Voting Rights Act, when there were no black governors, no black mayors of any major city, no black senators and only four black Congressman, masterminded several federal crimes in order to make sure that her black son was eligible to run for president one day?